Genetic afterlives : Black Jewish indigeneity in South Africa

Author(s)

    • Tamarkin, Noah

Bibliographic Information

Genetic afterlives : Black Jewish indigeneity in South Africa

Noah Tamarkin

(Theory in forms / edited by Nancy Rose Hunt and Achille Mbembe)

Duke University Press, 2020

  • : paperback

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-248) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced to the Lemba Cultural Association that a recent DNA study substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews. Lemba people subsequently leveraged their genetic test results to seek recognition from the post-apartheid government as indigenous Africans with rights to traditional leadership and land, retheorizing genetic ancestry in the process. In Genetic Afterlives, Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship. Tamarkin turns away from genetics researchers' results that defined a single story of Lemba peoples' "true" origins and toward Lemba understandings of their own genealogy as multivalent. Guided by Lemba people's negotiations of their belonging as diasporic Jews, South African citizens, and indigenous Africans, Tamarkin considers new ways to think about belonging that can acknowledge the importance of historical and sacred ties to land without valorizing autochthony, borders, or other technologies of exclusion.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Diaspora, Indigeneity, and Citizenship after DNA 1 1. Producing Lemba Archives, Becoming Genetic Jews 29 2. Genetic Diaspora 57 3. Postapartheid Citizenship and the Limits of Genetic Evidence 88 4. Ancestry, Ancestors, and Contested Kinship after DNA 120 5. Locating Lemba Heritage, Imagining Indigenous Futures 153 Epilogue. Afterlives of Research Subjects 187 Notes 197 References 223

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  • Theory in forms

    edited by Nancy Rose Hunt and Achille Mbembe

    Duke University Press

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